Analysis
This ghostly tale is considered to be a Gothic Tale due to its Freudian uncanny nature. It is something that is familiar while at the same time as being repressed. It is possibly something that is hidden, but has been brought to life. Freud describes it as atavistic feelings of death.
“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” makes the reader encounter several various feelings about the short story. It also brings diverse questions to its readers. Does Arthur really ever love Viola? Why does he really let Viola open the chest?
The Gothic short story is a representation of the century in which it was written with a twist. James invites several different types of emotions to the reader, as well as the characters. The story is written in a format that allows the reader to become angry and confused about Viola's actual motivations after her sister’s death. At the same time, others may understand this is her revenge. Her motivation is the opening of the chest that was not to be touched until the daughter was ready to wear the clothing and jewelry. Perdita is the one who actually has the last laugh or success so to speak, she was well aware of her sister’s intention, and her ghostly body guarded her family and the chest. Perdita haunts the family and eventually kills her sister. This is the something that Freud is trying to interpret when he describes the “uncanny.” This is the strange with the familiar. It is also a repetition. After all, both sisters have their revenge.
Read more about this topic: The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)